JOINT STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONERS MICHAEL J. COPPS AND KEVIN J . MARTIN
Re: Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service; Implementation of the Local
Competition Provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Order on
Reconsideration, CC Docket Nos. 96-45 & 96-98
We write separately to express our support for the Commission's efforts to reduce
its backlog of outstanding petitions. Clearing this backlog enables this Commission to
work from a clean slate, allowing us to make decisions on current matters faster and
thereby promote regulatory stability. We thus commend the Chairman for making the
elimination of outstanding petitions a priority.
At the same time, we recognize that the means by which this Order reduces
backlog, although necessary in this instance, is far from ideal. In this Order, we dismiss
petitions for reconsideration that went unresolved for such a long time that we found it
necessary to require parties affirmatively to indicate whether they still wished to pursue
them. Allowing petitions to become moot solely due to the Commission's failure to act is
unfortunate, at best. More problematically, the process used here raises the possibility
that a party may fail to indicate its intention to pursue its petition only because it failed to
receive notice of the Commission's intentions.
Nevertheless, we vote for this item because the Commission conducted
substantial outreach to ensure that parties - and in particular non-traditional stakeholders
that may not have representatives in Washington - had actual notice before a petition was
dismissed. Indeed, additional outreach at our request determined that several parties
whose petitions were going to be dismissed in fact still wished to pursue them. Those
petitions have now been removed from the list of petitions we dismiss today. We
commend the Commission for undertaking these efforts. In the future, we hope that
actions such as today's order are not needed. But if they are, we expect that the
Commission will undertake the kind of substantial outreach efforts it undertook here.